Title

Author

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Geography

First Advisor

Joe Bryan

Second Advisor

Jennifer Fluri

Third Advisor

Jennifer Fluri Dunn

Abstract

This thesis evaluates Colombian landmine victims’ intersecting experiences of physical impairment and internal displacement. As victims of political violence, landmine victims are entitled to reparations under the 2011 “Victims and Land Restitution Law” (the Victims’ Law). The constant struggles associated with claiming these reparations, however, constitute revictimizing experiences for landmine victims that in turn produce an indeterminate citizenship. The difficulty in claiming reparations forms a key piece of the constellation of factors that ground landmine victims’ experiences of disability. Disability for landmine victims has a distinct spatiality that cannot be fully understood apart from their experiences of internal displacement. Their understandings of disability are informed by memories of past rural livelihoods that become closed off in the forced transition to urban contexts. Disability is eminently political, arising from political violence and sustained through social processes of neglect.